Never the deux shall meet

THE YEAR DOES not begin in January. Every French person knows that. Only awkward English-speakers think it starts in January.

The year really begins on the first Monday of September.

This is when Parisians get back to their desks after their month-long holiday and begin working out where they’ll go for the mid-term break in November.

It’s also when every French project, from a new hairdo to a nuclear power station, gets under way, which is why, at 9am on the first Monday of September, I was standing a hundred yards from the Champs-Élysées watching people kissing.

My good friend Chris told me not to come to France. Great lifestyle, he said, great food, and totally un-politically correct women with great underwear.

But, he warned me, the French are hell to live with. He worked in the London office of a French bank for three years.

“They made all us Brits redundant the day after the French football team got knocked out of the World Cup. No way was that a coincidence,” he told me.

His theory was that the French are like the woman scorned. Back in 1940 they tried to tell us they loved us, but we just laughed at their accents and their big-nosed Général de Gaulle, and ever since we’ve done nothing but poison them with our disgusting food and try to wipe the French language off the face of the Earth. That’s why they built refugee camps yards from the Eurotunnel entrance and refuse to eat our beef years after it was declared safe. It’s permanent payback time, he said. Don’t go there.

Sorry, I told him, I’ve got to go and check out that underwear.

Normally, I suppose you would be heading for disaster if the main motivation for your job mobility was the local lingerie, but my one-year contract started very promisingly.

I found my new employer’s offices – a grand-looking 19th-century building sculpted out of milky-gold stone – and walked straight into an orgy.

There were people kissing while waiting for the lift. People kissing in front of a drinks machine. Even the receptionist was leaning across her counter to smooch with someone – a woman, too – who’d entered the building just ahead of me.

Wow, I thought, if there’s ever a serious epidemic of facial herpes, they’ll have to get condoms for their heads.

Of course I knew the French went in for cheek-kissing, but not on this scale. I wondered if it wasn’t company policy to get a neckload of Ecstasy before coming into work.

I edged closer to the reception desk where the two women had stopped kissing and were now exchanging news. The company obviously didn’t believe in glamorous front-office girls, because the receptionist had a masculine face that seemed much more suited to scowling than smiling. She was complaining about something I didn’t understand.

I beamed my keenest new-boy smile at her. No acknowledgement. I stood in the “yes, I’m here and I wouldn’t mind being asked the purpose of my visit” zone for a full minute. Zilch. So I stepped forward and spouted out the password I’d memorized: “Bonjour, je suis Paul West. Je viens voir Monsieur Martin.”

The two women gabbled on about having “déjeuner”, which I knew was lunch, and they made at least half a dozen I’ll-phone-you gestures before the receptionist finally turned to me.

“Monsieur?” No apology. They might kiss each other, but I could kiss off.

I repeated my password. Or tried to.

“Bonjour, je …” No, my head was full of suppressed anger and linguistic spaghetti. “Paul West,” I said. “Monsieur Martin.” Who needs verbs? I managed another willing smile.

The receptionist – name badge: Marianne, personality: Hannibal Lecter – tutted in reply.

I could almost hear her thinking, can’t speak any French. Probably thinks De Gaulle had a big nose. Bastard.

“I’ll call his assistant,” she said, probably. She picked up the phone and punched in a number, all the while giving me a tip-to-toe inspection as if she didn’t think I was of the required standard to meet the boss.

Do I really look that bad?, I wondered. I’d made an effort to be as chic as a Brit in Paris should be. My best grey-black Paul Smith suit (my only Paul Smith suit). A shirt so white that it looked as if it’d been made from silkworms fed on bleach, and an electrically zingy Hermès tie that could have powered the whole Paris metro if I’d plugged it in. I’d even worn my black silk boxers to give my self-esteem an invisible boost. French women aren’t the only ones who can do underwear.

No way did I deserve such a withering look, especially not in comparison to most of the people I’d seen entering the building – guys looking like Dilbert, women in drab catalogue skirts, lots of excessively comfortable shoes.

* * *

“Christine? J’ai un Monsieur—?” Marianne the receptionist squinted over at me.

This was my cue to do something, but what?

“Votre nom?” Marianne asked, rolling her eyes upwards and turning the last word into a huff of despair at my slug-like stupidity.

“Paul West.”

“Pol Wess,” Marianne said, “a visitor for Monsieur Martin.” She hung up. “Sit over there,” she said in slow, talking-to-Alzheimer-sufferer French.

The boss evidently kept the glamorous ones in his office, because Christine, the assistant who took me up to the fifth floor, was a tall brunette with poise and a dark-lipped smile that would have melted a man’s trousers at twenty paces. I was standing mere inches away from her in the lift, looking deep down into her eyes, breathing in her perfume. Slightly cinnamon. She smelt edible.

It was one of those occasions when you think, come on, lift, conk out now. Get jammed between two floors. I’ve had a pee, I can take the wait. Just give me an hour or two to work my charm with a captive audience.

Trouble is, I would have had to teach her English first. When I tried to chat her up, she just smiled stunningly and apologized in French for not understanding a bloody word. Still, here at least was one Parisienne who didn’t seem to hate me.

* * *

We emerged in a corridor that was like a collision between a gothic mansion and a double-glazing lorry. A long oriental-looking carpet covered all but the narrow margins of creaky, polished floorboards. The ceiling and walls of the corridor were decorated with great swirls of antique moulded plasterwork, but the original doors had been ripped off their hinges and replaced with 70s-vintage tinted glass. As if to cover up the clash of styles, the corridor was lined with enough greenleaved plants to host a jungle war.

Christine knocked on a glass door and a male voice called, “Entrez!”

I went in and there he was, set against a background of the Eiffel Tower poking its finger into the cloudy sky. My new boss stood up and walked around his desk to greet me.

“Monsieur Martin,” I said, holding out a hand for him to shake. “Pleased to see you again.”

“You must call me Jean-Marie,” he replied in his slightly accented but excellent English. He took my hand and used it to pull me so close I thought we were about to do the cheek-rubbing thing. But no, he only wanted to pat my shoulder. “Welcome to France,” he said.

Bloody hell, I thought. Now two of them like me.

Jean-Marie looked pretty cool for a company chairman. He was 50 or so, but his dark eyes shone with youth, his hair was receding but slicked back and cut short so that it didn’t matter, and his royal-blue shirt and golden tie were effortlessly chic. He had an open, friendly face.

He asked for some coffees and I noticed that he called Christine “tu” whereas she called him “vous”. I’d never managed to work that one out.

“Sit down, Paul,” Jean-Marie said, switching back to English. “Is everything OK? Your voyage, the hotel?”

“Oh yes, fine, thanks …” A bit basic, but it had cable.

“Good, good.” When he looked at you, you felt as if making you happy was the only thing that mattered on the entire planet. Sod global warming, does Paul like his hotel room? That’s the important issue of the day.

“Everyone seems to be very happy here, kissing each other,” I said.

“Ah, yes.” He looked out into the corridor, apparently checking for passers-by to French-kiss. “It is the rentrée, you know, the re-entry. Like we are returning home from space. To us Parisians anything more than ten kilometres from the Galeries Lafayette is a different planet. We have not seen our colleagues for a month, and we are happy to meet them again.” He snorted as if at a private joke. “Well, not always very happy, but we cannot refuse to kiss them.”

“Even the men?”

Jean-Marie laughed. “You think French men are effeminate?”

“No, no, of course not.” I thought I’d hit a nerve.

“Good.”

I got the feeling that if Christine had been in the room he’d have whipped down his trousers and proved his manhood on her.

He clapped as if to clear the air of testosterone. “Your office will be next to mine. We have the same view. What a view, eh?” He held out an arm towards the window to introduce his guest star. It was quite a star, too. “If you work in Paris, you don’t always get a view of the Eiffel Tower,” he said proudly.

“Great,” I said.

“Yes, great. We want you to be happy with us,” Jean-Marie said. At the time he probably meant it.

When I first met him in London he made his company, VianDiffusion, sound like a family, with him as the favourite uncle rather than the godfather or big brother. He’d taken over the meat-processing business about ten years earlier from his dad, the founder, who’d started out as a humble butcher. They now had four “factories” (basically, giant food mixers – mooing animals in one end, mincemeat out the other) plus their head office. Turnover was massive thanks to the limitless French appetite for hamburgers, or “steaks hâchés” as they patriotically call them. It seemed to me when Jean-Marie recruited me that he was looking to lift the company out of the offal. My new “English” project was designed to make people forget his bloody beginnings. Perhaps that was why he greeted me so warmly.

Now to see if the rest of my colleagues would love me as much as he did.

“One thing, Jean-Marie,” I said as he ushered – almost carried – me along the corridor towards the meeting room. “Do I call everyone tu or vous?” Not that I was capable of calling them either.

“Ah, it is quite simple. You, in your position, call everyone with whom you work tu. Except maybe anyone who looks old. And except if you have not been presented to them yet. Most people here will call you tu also. Some will call you vous if they are very less senior or if they think they don’t know you. OK?”

“Er, yes.” Clear as onion soup.

“But in your team everyone will speak English.”

“English? Shouldn’t I try to integrate?”

Jean-Marie didn’t answer. He gave a final tug on my elbow and we were inside the meeting room. It took up the full depth of the building, with windows at both ends. Eiffel Tower in one, courtyard and a modern glass office building in the other.

There were four other people in the room. A man and woman stood huddled near the courtyard window, and another man and woman sat silently at a long oval table.

“Everyone, this is Paul,” Jean-Marie announced in English.

My new work-chums turned to meet me. The two men were a very tall, thick-set blond, about 40, and a younger, skinny guy who was bald. The two women were a natural honey blonde, about 30, with a tightly pulled back pony tail and a jutting chin that just stopped her being beautiful, and a round-faced, kind-looking woman, 35-ish, with large brown eyes and a dowdy pink blouse.

I shook their hands and instantly forgot their names.

We sat down at the table, me and Jean-Marie on one side, my four new colleagues on the other.

“OK, everyone. This is a very exciting moment,” Jean-Marie declared. “We are, as the English say, branching away. Flying into new horizons. We know we can succeed in the restaurant business. The fast-food industry in France could not exist without our minced beef. Now we are going to take some more of the profit with our new English tea cafés. And we have someone here who knows this business.” He gestured proudly towards me. “As you know, Paul was chief of marketing of the chain of French cafés in England, Voulez-Vous Café Avec Moi. How many cafés have you created, Paul?”

“There were 35 when I left the company. But that was two weeks ago, so who knows how many there are now.”

I was joking, but everyone in the room gaped at me, believing totally in this Anglo-American dynamism.

“Yes,” Jean-Marie said, bathing vicariously in my reputation. “I saw their success and I wanted their head of marketing, so I went to London and decapitated him. Decapitated?”

“Head-hunted,” I said.

“Yes, thank you. I am sure that Paul will bring to our new chain of English cafés in France the same success as he has known with the similar concept in England of French cafés in, er, England. Maybe you can continue to present yourself, Paul?” he said, apparently exhausted by his last sentence.

“Sure.” I gazed along the line opposite with my best imitation of co-workerly love. “My name’s Paul West,” I told them. I saw them all practise saying my name. “I was in at the creation of Voulez-Vous Café Avec Moi. We launched in July last year – July the fourteenth of course, Bastille Day – with five cafés in London and the southeast, and then opened the others in the major British cities and shopping centres in three waves of ten. I’ve brought a report with me so that you can read the full story. Before that I worked for a small brewery – beer company,” I added, seeing their frowns, “and that’s about it.”

“You rilly yong,” said the skinny bloke. Not accusingly, but annoyingly.

“Not really, I’m 27. If I was a rock star I’d be dead.”

The bloke made apologetic gestures. “No, no. Ah’m not criti-sahzing. Ah’m just … admirative.” He had a weird accent. Not quite French. I couldn’t place it.

“Ah, we are all admiring Paul, that’s for sure.” Jean-Marie again managed to make me feel like I was receiving a gay come-on. “Why don’t everyone present himself?” he said. “Bernard, start please.”

Bernard was the tall, stocky one, with a flat-top haircut and a neat blond moustache. He looked like a Swedish policeman who’d retired early because of bad feet. He was wearing a sickly-blue shirt and a tie that just failed to be red enough. He could have had “dull” tattooed across his forehead but that would have made him too exciting.

Bernard smiled nervously and began.

“Yam bare narr, yam responsa bull ov communika syon, er …”

Shit, I thought, didn’t Jean-Marie say the meeting was going to be in English? How come some people were allowed to speak Hungarian?

Bernard of Budapest carried on in the same incomprehensible vein for a couple of minutes and then started to enunciate something which, to judge by the look of acute constipation on his face, was of great importance. “Alok for wah toowa king wizioo.”

Hang on, I thought. I don’t speak any Central European languages, but I got that. He’s looking forward to working with me. Holy Babel fish. It’s English, Jim, but not as we know it.

“Thank you, Bernard,” Jean-Marie said, smiling encouragingly. Had he chosen the crappest one to highlight his own excellent English? I hoped so. “Next, Marc.”

Marc was the bald skinny one. He was wearing a dark grey shirt, unbuttoned at the collar and unironed. Turned out he’d spent a few years in the southern USA, hence the weird accent, which made him sound like Scarlett O’Hara after too much Pernod.

“Ah’m ed of hah tee,” he said.

“Ed of hah tee,” I repeated approvingly, wondering what the hell this was. Something to do with tea, anyway. Relevant.

“Yah. Compoodah sis-temm,” Marc confirmed.

“Oh, I.T.,” I said. He glowered at me. “Your English is excellent,” I added quickly. “How long did you spend in the USA?”

“Ah’ve done a yee-uh uv post-grad at Jo-ja State, then Ah’ve worked fahv yee-uhs inna inshance firm in Atlanna. In da hah tee departmon, a coss.”

“A coss,” I agreed.

“OK, Marc. Stéphanie?” Jean-Marie the MC again.

Stéphanie was the blonde woman with the jaw. Her accent was strong and French, her grammar terrifying, but my ear was getting tuned. Stéphanie was the “responsa bull ov poorshassing” (purchasing) for the main meat-processing part of the company, and was now “vairy eppy” to be “ap-wanted responsa bull ov poorshassing” for the proposed chain of “Eengleesh tea saloons”.

It was obviously as exhausting for her to speak as she was to listen to, and at the end of her short speech she gave Jean-Marie a look that said I’ve done my 50 press-ups and I hope you think it was worth it, you sadistic bastard.

“Thank you, Stéphanie. Nicole.”

The other woman, the dark, short-haired one, had a soft voice, but she spoke very clearly. She was the financial controller on this project, as she was for the whole company.

“You’ve been to England, haven’t you, Nicole?” I said. “Quite often as well, to judge by your accent.” Rule one of office life – always flatter your financial controller.

“Yes, my usband was Hinglish,” she said, smiling wistfully. Oh dear, dead or divorced?, I wondered. Not the time to ask.

“Do not be fooled by Nicole,” Jean-Marie said. “She looks like she is very kind, but she has a heart of iron. She is the reason why our finances are so good. She is our real boss.”

Nicole blushed. There was some unrequited stuff going on here, I decided. Jean-Marie praising her professional skills, Nicole wanting to rip her bodice open and have him praise her boobs. Or was I being stereotypical?

“Well, your English is so much better than my French,” I told them, taking special care to look Stéphanie and Bernard, my fellow linguistic invalids, in the eye. “I’ve bought myself a teach-yourself-French CD-Rom and I promise I’ll start teaching myself toot sweet.”

They were kind enough to laugh.

As we were all chums together now, I decided to throw in my little idea. Nothing controversial.

“I thought we could decide on a working name for the project,” I suggested. “Just something temporary, you know, to give us an identity as a team. Something like Tea Time.”

“Oh.” It was Bernard, jerking himself upright. “No, we av nem. Ma Tea Eez Reesh.”

I frowned, the others laughed. I turned to Jean-Marie for help. He was looking elsewhere.

“My Tea Is Rich? As a brand name for the tea rooms? It’s not really a name,” I ventured. “It doesn’t really mean anything.”

“Uh.” Bernard was crap at English but clearly very good at monosyllables. “Ma Tea Eez Reesh eez funny nem. Eaties Ingleesh oomoor.”

“English humour? But we don’t say that.”

“Oh.” Bernard turned to Jean-Marie for support.

“Of course it should be my tailor,” Jean-Marie explained.

“Your tailor?” I felt as if I was in the middle of a surrealist film. In a minute Salvador Dali was going to fly in through the window with a baguette sticking out of his trousers.

“My tailor is rich,” Jean-Marie said.

“Is he?” Here comes Salvador, I thought, but all I could see out the window was the Eiffel Tower as usual.

“My tailor is rich is a typical English expression.”

“It’s not.”

“But French people think it is. It was in the old language books.”

“OK, OK, I think I’m with you,” I said. The others were peering at me as if I was about to get the joke at last and laugh. “It’s like my postilion has been struck by lightning.”

“Uh?” Now it was the French team’s turn to look lost.

“It’s from our old language books,” I said. “I get you now.” I put on a eureka smile. Everyone nodded. Misunderstanding cleared up. Problem solved. “But it’s still an awful name.” I mean, I had to tell them for their own good. For the good of the project.

“Oh!”

“You absolutely want Tea Time?” Jean-Marie was not looking keen. “This is a bit flat.”

“No, not absolutely. Just as a provisional name. I suggest we get a market survey done before deciding on the definitive brand, but meanwhile let’s choose a simple working title. If you don’t like Tea Time, how about Tea For Two?”

“Oh no.” This was Stéphanie. “Dis is flat also. We want fonny nem. Like Bare-narr say, Ingleesh oomoor.”

“And, er, if we coll eet Tease Café?” Marc said.

“Tease Café?” I was lost again.

“Yuh. Tea, apostrof, s, café,” Marc explained. Stéphanie nodded. Good idea.

“Tea’s Café? But that’s not English either.”

“Yes,” Stéphanie retorted. “You av many nems with apostrof. Arry’s Bar. Liberty’s Statue.”

“Brooklyn’s Bridge,” Marc said.

“Trafalgar’s Square,” Bernard added.

“No …”

“Roll’s Royce,” Bernard said, on a roll.

“No!” Where did they get this crap?

“In France this is considered very English.” Jean-Marie was playing interpreter again. “There is an American café on the Champs-Élysées called Sandwich’s Café.”

“Yes.” Stéphanie confirmed this with a prod of her finger on to the table.

“OK, but it’s not English,” I had to insist. “It’s like when you call a campsite ‘un camping’ or a car park ‘un parking’. You may think it’s English, but it’s not.”

“Oh.” Stéphanie appealed to Jean-Marie the referee. An attack on the French language? Yellow card, surely?

“Each country adapts the culture of the other country,” Jean-Marie said. “When I was in England, all the restaurants had strawberry crème brûlée. But crème brûlée is crème brûlée. Why not have a strawberry baguette? Or a strawberry camembert?”

The French team nodded their approval of Jean-Marie’s firm but fair discipline.

“Yes, it is like you Ingleesh you put oronge joo-eece in shompagne,” Stéphanie said. “Merde alors.”

The others winced in sympathy at this desecration of their national treasure.

“But you put blackcurrant liqueur in champagne to make kir royal.” I’d read this in my guidebook and now wished I hadn’t. French eyebrows knitted at my English know-it-all repartee.

Jean-Marie tried to pour some virgin olive oil on things. “We will make a market survey. We will test these names and others. We will make a list of our suggestions.”

“Right.” I nodded like a plastic Alsatian in the back of a car, eager to accept this brilliant idea coming from the French diplomat.

“Bernard can maybe organize it,” Jean-Marie suggested.

Bernard smiled. He was the man for the job. From the dull twinkle in his eye I could tell he was confident of persuading the pollsters to go with his idea.

“OK, very constructive,” Jean-Marie said. “This is a real Anglo-style meeting. Taking decisions.”

Decisions? We can’t agree, so we decide to pay a consultant who’s going to be bribed into agreeing with the guy with the crappest ideas. Didn’t seem very constructive to me. But then it was my first ever French meeting. I had a lot to learn.

Outside of the office, my entrée into Paris society was just as depressing.

Jean-Marie was paying for me to stay in a hotel about a kilometre west of the Arc de Triomphe, not actually in Paris at all. It was just off an eight-lane highway called, romantically, Big Army Avenue that charged out from Paris proper towards the skyscrapers of La Défense business district.

The hotel was a nondescript modern building made of artificial stone the colour of snow that’s been peed on by a dog. My room was decorated in the same colour. It was supposed to be a double but the only way for two people to stand on the floor at the same time would have been to have intercourse. Which was perhaps the idea, though there wasn’t much of that kind of action going on while I was in it.

Anyway, the hotel was in a posh suburb called Neuilly, pronounced Ner-yee, and not Newly as I called it the whole time I lived there. It was dull but had two or three shopping streets full of the kind of small stores that you don’t get in the UK any more. Fishmongers, cheese shops, chocolate shops, raw-meat butchers, cooked-meat butchers, horsemeat butchers, there was even a shop selling only roast chickens.

So when the batteries in my mini hi-fi system went into their umpteenth coma, I thought I’d go to my friendly local electrician’s shop to buy a mains adapter. I wandered out one Saturday and eventually found a little painted shopfront full of radios and torches and other small electronic gizmos.

Inside there was a long, fingerprint-marked glass counter and a chaotic shelving system stacked with everything from tiny watch batteries to hoovers and food mixers. Amongst all the boxes stood a middle-aged guy with a grey nylon overall and an equally grey face. The Addams Family’s Parisian cousin.

“Bonjour.” I smiled as an advance apology for the bad French that was to come. He didn’t smile back. He just stared at me from under his barbed-wire eyebrows, weighing me up and coming to unpleasant conclusions.

I should perhaps add that I wasn’t wearing my Paul Smith suit at this point. I was in an orange floral shirt that I found in the Portobello Road. It had a kind of Hawaiian-paint-factory-explosion motif that I thought made me look laid-back and friendly, especially when accompanied by long surfer shorts and fire-extinguisher-red trainers. I had noticed that not many other people in Neuilly were dressed like this, but it was a pleasantly warm autumn day, and I never dreamt that it could have any influence on my chances of buying electrical equipment.

“Je,” I began, and then suddenly realized that I didn’t know the French for hi-fi system, mains lead, plug, adapter, or, to be totally honest, electricity. I mean, in the UK, if you want to buy anything electrical you just go to a superstore and help yourself. At the very worst, the most you have to do is point.

“J’ai un hi-fi,” I ventured, giving the last word a French lilt – “ha-fa”. The electrician didn’t look perplexed, which was encouraging. Though he didn’t look interested, either. I ventured further into the linguistic wilderness. “J’ai un ha-fa anglais.” Big apologetic smile. Sorry, I’m doing my best. Please bear with me. “J’ai un ha-fa anglais, mais ici …” I tried to look suitably helpless, which wasn’t difficult. The shop assistant still showed no signs of assisting. Bugger it, I decided, and activated the linguistic ejector seat. “I need an adapter to plug my British hi-fi into the electricity here,” I explained in English, with perfect diction and copious amounts of mime.

I always thought the French were into mime, but this bloke wasn’t a Marcel Marceau fan.

“Parlez français,” he said, with a little “huh” at the end which seemed to be Neuilly slang for “you ignorant English twit”.

“If I could I would, you obnoxious tit,” I told him, feeling marginally better because of the insult he’d never understand.

But in reply he just gave a shrug that seemed to say “whatever your problem is, it’s your problem, not mine, which is sad but rather amusing, because from the look of you, you’re the type of idiot that makes a habit of getting into stupid, no-win situations like this. And by the way that shirt is totally gross.” All this in one shrug.

There was no way I was going to win a shrugging contest, or get my hands on an adapter, so I walked out.

I’d gone no more than a yard when my whole body froze in a paralysed T’ai Chi pose, both knees bent and one foot lifted to knee height.

There was a ginger-brown pat of dog turd trowelled on to the toe of my beautiful red trainer.

“Shit!”

Was it my imagination or did I hear the electrician call out: “No, you mean ‘merde’, you ignorant foreigner.”

Paris is, I was beginning to realize, a bit like an ocean. An ocean is a great place to live if you’re a shark. There’s loads of fresh seafood, and if anyone gives you shit you just bite them in half. You might not be loved by everyone, but you’ll be left in peace to enjoy yourself.

If you’re human, though, you spend your time floating on the surface, buffeted by the waves, preyed on by the sharks.

So the thing to do is evolve into a shark as quickly as you can.

And the first item on your evolutionary agenda is to learn to speak fluent shark.

I had my DIY French CD, but I thought Jean-Marie’s assistant, Christine, might like to give me a few private lessons. After all, you might as well get yourself a shark with cute fins.

Christine – what a bad idea that was.

I’m not the sort of guy who thinks that love is just a tennis score. But I haven’t made a great success of relationships. That was one of my reasons for jumping at the offer to leave the UK. I was with a woman in London, Ruth, but it was a mutually self-destructive thing. We’d phone, arrange to meet, then wait and see which one of us would get in first with a good reason to cancel. Finally we’d meet up for a bitchy row and/or earth-trembling sex, then stay incommunicado for two weeks, then phone, etc etc. We both agreed that my wanting to emigrate was a sign that maybe things between us weren’t ideal.

It was almost two weeks since I’d done any earth-trembling when I first got in that lift with Christine. But I didn’t need the unused hormones washing about in my bloodstream to see that she was excruciatingly beautiful. Her hair was long, barely styled at all, the way lots of French girls wear their hair, and gave her the chance to make coyly seductive moves like pushing a loose lock behind an ear or sweeping it all back off her forehead. She was pretty skinny – again, the way lots of French girls are – but her slenderness didn’t stop her having all the right curves and protuberances. And she had incredible eyes – almost golden-coloured – that seemed to be saying she thought I wasn’t such a Quasimodo either. She fluttered her enormous (real) eyelashes at me whenever I walked into her office, which I found myself doing more than was strictly necessary for the day-to-day business of starting up a couple of tea rooms.

My abysmal French made her laugh. And making her laugh, even if it meant humiliating myself, made me feel decidedly pleasant.

“Tu es professeur pour moi,” I garbled one day in my first week.

She laughed. I pretended to be offended.

“Non. Je veux parler français,” I told her.

She laughed again and replied something that I didn’t understand.

“Tu apprendre anglais avec moi?” I suggested. “Nous, er …” and I did my best to mime an exchange of conversation lessons with a gesture that turned out a bit more gynaecological than I’d intended.

Still, my cervical mime didn’t put her off. We went for an after-work drink that evening at a viciously expensive underground cocktail bar just off the Champs-Élysées. The kind of place where everyone sits up very straight in their Philippe Starck armchairs so that they can be seen.

I leant low towards Christine, and we talked about life in London and Paris in a sort of fun pigeon Franglais. And like a pigeon, I spent a lot of time cooing.

We were just getting cosy, at fingertip-brushing stage, when she suddenly did a Cinderella.

“Mon train,” she said.

“Non, non, le métro est très brrmm brrmm,” I objected, meaning that it would have her home long before she turned into a pumpkin.

She shook her head and showed me a little fold-out map of the suburban trains. She lived miles out of town.

“Viens chez moi,” I offered sportingly – one of the best phrases I’d found in my CD-Rom’s vocab lists. Vee-en shay mwa. Sounded like a kiss.

She tutted, brushed her dark lips against my mouth, stroked my chin with a long finger, and left me nailed to the table by a hard-on that it would have taken a UN resolution to disarm.

I didn’t get it. Most of the English women I’d taken out for after-work drinks in London would either have made it brutally clear I was not Mr Sexy or had their calves clamped round my ears by now. But then maybe I’d been dating the ear-clamping type of gal.

* * *

First thing next morning, I brought her coffee in her office.

“Ce soir, tu veux … ?” I left her to fill in the gap with either a conversation class or something more physical.

“Boire un verre?” she decided. She mimed a drink. OK for starters at least.

“On se retrouve au bar à dix-neuf heures?” she articulated.

Meet up at the bar. Keeping it secret. Good, I thought. The previous day we’d left the office together, causing raised eyebrows in the corridor.

When we met up at seven that evening, Christine didn’t seem much into English conversation. She asked me in French if I was married and had kids back in London.

“Mais non!” I assured her.

“Pourquoi pas?”

“Pfff,” I explained. My French didn’t stretch to a more detailed description of my disastrous relationship with Ruth.

She did her eye-fluttering thing, and Cinderella’d off at eight on the dot.

I really couldn’t figure out French women. Were they fans of mental foreplay? Only into intellectual sex?

Or did they want to be jumped on? (I didn’t think so – I’ve never met any woman of any nationality who appreciated the rugby-tackle approach to seduction.)

Or maybe this was a Frenchwoman’s way of symbolizing the relationship between France and the Brits – she dangles her sexy image in front of me, but keeps her distance to avoid catching mad-cow disease.

I looked for an explanation in a report I’d commissioned on what the French really thought of us.

There was nothing specific in there about why Christine wouldn’t sleep with me, but it still made interesting reading. Apart from mad-cow disease and hooligans, the most common things that the French associated with the word “anglais” were the Queen, Shakespeare, David Beckham, Mr Bean, the Rolling Stones (all of which were positive concepts, amazingly) and, yes, tea, which was seen as a stylish, civilized drink. The French had obviously never had milky horse piss slopped into a polystyrene beaker by a 16-year-old work-experience trainee in an English beach caff (I know all about milky horse piss – I was that work-experience trainee). In French cafés, the price of a cup of tea was on average double that of an espresso.

Holy tea cosies, I thought, why the hell hasn’t this English tea room thing been done before? And why hadn’t I got a better team working on it?

The rest of the team were supposed to be reading this and other reports as well, but whenever I asked for an opinion, all I got was a “vairy an-tress-ting”. They weren’t reading the bloody things at all. As far as I could tell they weren’t contributing anything to the project. Autumn had hardly started and they were already dead wood.

Looked like I’d have to talk to Jean-Marie about getting Stéphanie, Bernard and Marc transferred over to a project they actually gave a damn about. Away from my tea rooms, anyway.

They were going to hate me, of course, but I had no choice.

I told Jean-Marie that there was a delicate subject I wanted to discuss, and he insisted we go out to lunch together that very “midi”. Very important day to go out to lunch, he said. He didn’t elaborate.

We left the building at 12.30 with “bon appétit” ringing in our ears. The people who saw us called it out like you would say “Happy Christmas”. Every lunchtime, it seemed, was a celebration. And why not?

The street was filling up with smart office people. This close to the Champs-Élysées, there was a lot of Chanel and Dior about. Sunglasses, bags, skirts. Among the middle-aged, anyway. There were also gaggles of young secretaries in designer jeans, their hair worn long and natural like Christine’s, their tight tops attracting frank stares from the men in suits. Including Jean-Marie, whose eyes seemed to flicker constantly from bum to boob level as he walked.

Two posh women went past in designer tweed. Paris clearly had its horsey set, though god knew where they kept their horses in this dense urban maze of streets – in an underground garage maybe.

“What’s so important about going out to lunch today?” I asked.

“You will see,” he teased, grinning at a passing navel.

At the street corner there was a typical Parisian brasserie – six round marble-topped tables on the pavement, cane chairs, glass-fronted veranda jutting out from the building.

Jean-Marie grabbed a chair at the last free outdoor table, ignoring the huffy complaint of the man who thought he was about to sit there.

“We are lucky,” Jean-Marie said. “In Paris, if it is sunny, all the outside tables are full. If it is a good café, of course.”

Two plastic-covered menus arrived on the table. The waiter was a grey-haired, harassed-looking man in the typical waiter’s uniform – white shirt, black trousers, and a black waistcoat with several bulging pockets full of small change. He paused just long enough to mumble something that I didn’t get about his “plat du jour”. He poked his finger towards a blue Post-It stuck on the menu and charged off to attend to another table. Whatever the “plat du jour” was, I couldn’t read the scrawled handwriting. Unless it really did include “crétin dauphin” (cretinous dolphin?), which I doubted.

“What is this thing we must discuss?” Jean-Marie asked. He had glanced at the menu and put it aside.

“Er.” I tried to read the menu and collect my thoughts.

Suddenly the waiter was there again, staring down at us. Jean-Marie smiled over at me, inviting me to order first.

“Er,” I repeated.

The waiter huffed and was gone. He hated me already. Had my English “er” given me away?

“The reports are very—” Jean-Marie stopped and frowned. “How you say, prometteur? Prom—?”

“Er.” We’d now been at the table for about thirty seconds.

“Promisefull?”

“Promising.”

“The Marks & Spencer report was very promising. They were stupid to shut their stores in France. French people like English products.”

“Yes. Er, what are you having?” I was lost.

“Chèvre chaud,” he said.

“Chèvre?”

“It means the female – what is it, like a mutton but with – on its head – corns?”

“Corns on its head?”

“Horns?”

“Ah, goat.”

“Yes, goat.”

Hot goat?

The waiter was there again, hovering.

“Chèvre chaud,” I said. If I got the horns, I’d give them to Jean-Marie.

“Deux,” confirmed Jean-Marie.

“Et comme boisson?” the waiter asked. (Fish? You have to have fish with your goat?) This was why I usually lunched at the canteen. You just put what you wanted on your tray.

“Une Leffe,” Jean-Marie said. “A sort of beer,” he explained.

Of course, fish is “poisson”, “boisson” is drink.

“OK. Deux,” I said, getting into the swing of things.

The waiter grabbed the menus and left without taking any notes.

If the Parisians really did take two-hour lunch breaks, I thought, they still had one hour fifty-nine minutes free after ordering. Who said the Americans invented fast food?

“What is this thing we must discuss?” Jean-Marie asked again.

“It’s about your team,” I began. In at the deep end. “My team …” I’d thought a lot about how to rephrase “I don’t want them” and still hadn’t come up with an answer.

“I don’t need them,” I said, which didn’t sound at all as bad as not wanting them. Did it?

Jean-Marie gave a nervous laugh and reeled back in his chair. The waiter arrived with two sets of cutlery wrapped up in yellow paper napkins. The knives were serrated and pointed. I hoped Jean-Marie wasn’t going to get his out and use it on my jugular.

“You don’t need them?”

“Not yet. I need someone to research locations. Someone to do a consumer survey based on the reports we’re all supposed to be reading – what exactly do people expect from an English tea room? What would they eat when? Someone to suggest names and logos. It’s not something that Bernard, Stéphanie and the others can do.”

Jean-Marie was still reeling. He wasn’t going for his blade, though. Not yet. He sighed.

“French companies don’t function like English or American companies,” he said.

The waiter came back with two large stemmed glasses of frothy beer.

“Vous avez des frites?” Jean-Marie asked the waiter, who might or might not have heard. “You are right,” he told me. “Except for Nicole, the finance director who must survey all projects, and Marc, who will be very operative when we start to implement our stock systems and et cetera. I took Bernard and Stéphanie because I do not know what to do with them. They have work, but not enough. This is not to insult your project. On the contrary. I am depending more on you. I hope you can organize them, motivate them. Or if necessary, ignore them. They will occupy themselves.”

“Occupy themselves? Are their salaries part of my budget?”

Jean-Marie laughed. “You are funny. A worker is going a bit slow, you fire him. Here it is not the same. They call the inspecteur du travail, the work inspector, they complain, and you pay damages or the union makes a strike and it is the merde générale. And Bernard and Stéphanie are working for us since at least ten years. You know how much that costs for compensation if I fire them? Even if there is no strike by the other workers? And if I do have a strike, beef does not smell so good when the workers turn off the refrigerators.”

“I’m not suggesting you fire them. Just …” How should I express “make them disappear”?

The waiter returned with two plates piled high with glistening lettuce, topped with grilled pats of white cheese on small slices of toast. No horns. If he’d got the order wrong, I wasn’t going to complain.

He put the plates down, wished us “bon appétit” and turned away.

Jean-Marie asked for his frites.

“Je n’ai que deux mains, Monsieur,” the waiter said. He only had two hands. If I understood correctly, the waiter had just told Jean-Marie, very politely, to bugger off.

“What about this waiter?” I asked when the man had scooted off again. “Wouldn’t you fire him? He’s totally obnoxious.”

“Obnoxious?”

“Yes, you know, rude. A git.”

“Ah, a git, yes, I know this word. Yoo stoopid French git.” Jean-Marie smiled at some fond memory of being insulted by an Englishman. “Oh, the waiters are always hurried at lunchtime. They know if we are not happy, we won’t leave a tip.”

I’m not going to hire gits for my tea rooms, I thought. Though I had to admit this guy was fast. A hyper-git.

“And today, he is more hurried than usually,” Jean-Marie said, smiling mysteriously. He started to unwrap his cutlery.